Rolf Färe

Shawna Grosskopf

C.A. Knox Lovell

The Measurement of Efficiency of Production

The basic notion underlying this monograph - budget or revenue constrained models of production - we owe to Ronald W. Shephard, who recognized its fundamental importance in modeling behavior in a wide variety of settings including the service and public sector. Our endeavor here is to extend Shephard's earlier work in several directions while maintaining his axiomatic approach. Our contributions include an expanded set of duality results and a general bent toward empirical implementation: including various parameterizations, applications to efficiency and productivity measurement, and shadow pricing. We hope to provide those engaged in empirical work with some powerful and useful tools which have received relatively little attention. The nature of the material in this monograph is somewhat technical, however, the level of mathematical difficulty is standard. Although we have tried to keep the monograph fairly self-contained, we have also kept technical detail to a minimum in the body of the text. Many technical extensions appear as problems at the ends of Chapters. The reader is also referred to the notes at the end of each chapter for references to additional literature. A prepublication draft of this manuscript was used as lecture notes in a graduate course in production theory at the Department of Economics at Bilkent University. We thank our students as well as faculty members for their patience and interest. Special thanks go to Dean Togan, Zeynap Koksal and Ali Dogramaci for making our stay in Ankara not only productive, but also enjoyable.

Cost and Revenue Constrained Production

Runar Brännlund

Rolf Fare

This book extends the efficiency literature to the case of intertemporal models. First, the authors introduce static network models which serve as building blocks for the intertemporal budgeting models and the dynamic models. Next, the authors devote two chapters to productivity measurements, which are considered as comparative static models. Intertemporal budgeting models and dynamic models are taken up subsequently. Each chapter, except the first, contains empirical applications.

Intertemporal Production Frontiers: With Dynamic DEA

Daniel Primont

Our original reason for writing this book was the desire to write down in one place a complete summary of the major results in du ality theory pioneered by Ronald W. Shephard in three of his books, Cost and Production Functions (1953), Theory of Cost and Produc tion Functions (1970), and Indirect Production Functions (1974). In this way, newcomers to the field would have easy access to these important ideas. In adg,ition, we report a few new results of our own. In particular, we show the duality relationship between the profit function and the eight equivalent representations of technol ogy that were elucidated by Shephard. However, in planning the book and discussing it with colleagues it became evident that such a book would be more useful if it also provided a number of applications of Shephard's duality theory to economic problems. Thus, we have also attempted to present exam ples of the use of duality theory in areas such as efficiency measure ment, index number theory, shadow pricing, cost-benefit analysis, and econometric estimation. Much of our thinking about duality theory and its uses has been influenced by our present and former collaborators. They include Charles Blackorby, Shawna Grosskopf, Knox Lovell, Robert Russell, and, not surprisingly, Ronald W. Shephard. We have also benefit ted over the years from many discussions with W. Erwin Diewert.

Theory and Applications

Multi-Output Production and Duality: Theory and Applications

R. Robert Russell

Professor Sten Malmquist constructed the Malmquist quantity index and in doing so developed a distance function defined on a consumption space. This function is the consumer analog to the Shephard input distance function of producers and is used in ratio form to define the quantity index. This volume contains new contributions based on Malmquist's work nearly 50 years ago and provides modern perspectives on the value of this research.

Rolf Färe

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